postcolonial perspectives on
URBAN EPIDEMIOLOGY Thursday, 26th April 2018 Department of Geography University of Cambridge
Cover image: Open Hydrant Tank. Jacob Sassoon Mill, Bombay. (Source: Lewis Hackett, Far Eastern Trip Diary 1924, Rockefeller Foundation Records.)
postcolonial perspectives on
URBAN EPIDEMIOLOGY Thursday, 26th April 2018 11:00 - 18:00 Small Lecture Theatre Department of Geography Convenors: Nida Rehman Prof. Matthew Gandy Recent outbreaks of dengue fever, zika, ebola, and other diseases remind us that the urban landscapes of late modernity and processes of urbanization provide fresh opportunities for pathogenic agents and disease vectors. At the same time, long-standing colonial imaginaries of tropical environments, racialized bodies, and pathways of contagion continue to delineate technological, spatial, and regulatory norms as well as quotidian encounters. This workshop seeks to build an interdisciplinary conversation about urban infectious and epidemic disease through a postcolonial lens, probing how the material, spatial, and political landscapes of colonial and postcolonial modernity inform ongoing vulnerabilities, multi-species relationships, and public health frameworks. The workshop is supported by the European Research Council project Rethinking Urban Nature. Twitter: @natura_urb
Programme 11:00 - 11:15 Registration and set up 11:15 - 11:20 Welcome, Nida Rehman 11:20 - 11:30 Opening remarks, Matthew Gandy 11:30 - 12:45 Session 1 Development and its Discontents Uli Beisel (Universität Bayreuth Startseite) “Entanglements of Health and Agriculture, Past and Present in Insect Control in Ghana” Nandini Bhattacharya (University of Dundee) “No Magic Pill: The Failures of Quinisation in Colonial India” Discussant: Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge) 12:45 - 13:30 Lunch 13:30 - 15:00 Session 2 Subjects and Spaces Laurie Denyer Willis (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) “Landscapes of Zika: ‘Big Data’ and Imagined Epidemic Space in Urban Cape Verde” Freddie Stephenson (University of Nottingham) “Imperial Visions of Chineseness and Post-colonial Disease Vulnerability” Nida Rehman (University of Cambridge) “From Fractured Publics to Shared Responses: Rethinking Environmental Responsibility through Mosquito Control in Lahore” Discussant: Steve Hinchliffe (University of Exeter)
15:00 - 15:15 Coffee 15:15 - 16:30 Session 3 Microbial Urbanism Andrea Bagnato (Piet Zwart Institute) “Microbial Colonialism: On the Emergence of HIV and the History of Kinshasa” Meike Wolf (Goethe-Universität) “Infectious Entanglements: Managing Potential Pandemic Futures in Frankfurt” Discussant: Michelle Pentecost (King’s College London) 16:30 - 17:30 Round table closing discussion
Microscopic Colonialism: On the Emergence of HIV and the History of Kinshasa Andrea Bagnato (Piet Zwart Institute) The last decade of biomedical research has shed new light on the history of HIV, confirming the hypothesis that the virus began to circulate in humans much earlier than the global pandemic started. Using phylogenetic analysis, scientists have been able to define when and where SIV was first transmitted from chimpanzees to humans and subsequently mutated into HIV-1 – the lower Congo River basin in the 1900–1925 period – suggesting that the growth and social structure of Léopoldville/Kinshasa was a necessary factor in ensuing the virus’s survival. This presentation reviews the scientific evidence alongside unpublished documents from the Archives Africaines in Brussels, seeking to map the evolution of the virus in parallel with the architectural and urban development of Kinshasa. Through this material, it discusses cross-species transmission to ask whether the virus is in fact “natural” or not; it explores how the paradigm of economic liberalism created a new territorial order in central Africa that smoothed the circulation of unwanted matter; and it calls into question the Western urban model as the default way of organizing people in space and bringing civilization to the rest of the world. Andrea Bagnato holds master’s degree from TU Delft and Goldsmiths. He practiced architecture before focusing on research and book editing. He assisted in the making of the book Forensis (Sternberg Press, 2014), edited SQM: The Quantified Home (Lars Müller Publishers, 2014); he was publications manager for the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial and subsequently worked with Tomás Saraceno in Berlin. Andrea is currently a lecturer in the history and theory of architecture at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, and is editing a book on international borders and climate change in the Alps (with Studio Folder; Columbia/ZKM, 2018). This presentation is part of the long-term project Terra Infecta, which investigates infectious diseases in relation to urban and environmental transformation; it is supported by Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Graham Foundation.
Entanglements of Health and Agriculture, Past and Present in Insect Control in Ghana Uli Beisel (Universität Bayreuth Startseite) The Anopheles gambiae mosquito embodies malaria’s past, present and future. Malaria’s past is inscribed in today’s and tomorrow’s mosquito genome. However, encoded are not only past malaria control interventions, but also agricultural pest control choices. DDT that was used on Ghana’s cocoa and cotton plantations in the 1950s has led to the development of a kdr mutation in some Anopheles gambiae subspecies in the region. Today these subspecies can broaden their ecological niche again. Although DDT has been banned in Ghana since the mid 1980s, it turns out the kdr mutation conveys tolerance not only to DDT, but also to the insecticide pyrethroid. Pyrethroids are popular choice today in health and agriculture, as the substance is meant to only be minimally harmful to human health and effectively kills Anopheles mosquitoes and capsid bugs – one of the most important pests on cocoa plantations. In Hannah Landecker’s words through contact with pyrethroids, today’s mosquitoes come to embody the biology of history (Landecker, 2015). Interestingly though, it is not only the history of public health that can be modeled through Anopheles mosquitoes, but also the history of agriculture. Public health choices, agricultural pest control and globalized markets are en-acted in the genomes and bodies of mosquitoes and capsid bugs. This paper traces the post-colonial imaginaries and legacies embedded in the continued use of pesticide use in Ghana, suggesting we need to bring mutating insects, their socio-ecological environments, and the socio-economic configurations of health, agriculture and post-colonial economies they flourish or die in into close conversation with each other. Uli Beisel is Assistant Professor of Culture and Technology at University of Bayreuth (Germany). She holds a PhD in Human Geography from The Open University (UK). Uli has worked on human-mosquito-parasite entanglements in malaria control in Ghana and Sierra Leone, and the translation of new health technologies in Uganda and Rwanda. Her current research is looking at trust in biomedicine and its relation to health care infrastructures after the Ebola epidemic in a comparative project in Sierra Leone, Ghana and Uganda. Uli’s work has been published by inter alia Science as Culture, Society and Space, Biosocieties, Geoforum and Medical Anthropology.
No Magic Pill: The Failures of Quinisation in Colonial India Nandini Bhattacharya (University of Dundee) Malaria was ubiquitous in British India in either endemic or epidemic form. Historians, public health professionals and governments have calculated the deaths from malaria in the 19th century to millions annually, depopulating entire villages and inflicting misery and enduring poverty at overcrowded urban sites. When these horrific death rates are found to have declined somewhat in c.1930, contentious debates have ensued on their probable projects at localised sites of endemic malaria, or the government’s attempt to widely encourage the use of quinine as an anti-malarial prophylactic. Endemic malaria was often found to occur in consequence of infrastructural projects in the 19th century, such as the construction of dams and canals, which were therefore identified as a new and dangerous epidemiological trajectory for the disease. This has also led to speculations that the decline the mortality/morbidity rates of malaria occurred in consequence of the immunity acquired by the population after sixty-odd years of endemicity. This paper will explore the historical trajectories of the clearest and extensive preventive strategy used by the government in colonial India: quinisation, or the use of quinine as a prophylactic against the infection. This was facilitated through the distribution of quinine on a large scale to every district and village; through post-offices, schools, and government dispensaries. The mass dissemination of quinine was accompanied by sustained ‘propaganda’ or the popularisation of the use of quinine as prophylaxis through the print media in the vernacular languages and through posters and public health magic lantern shows. Yet, at the end, the policy of quinisation turned out to be a failure. A recent historiographical formulation has emphasised that quinine itself was ‘reconstituted’ in the process in colonial India. Historians have not engaged with the profile of this failure. This paper will situate the failure of quinisation in colonial India. Nandini Bhattacharya is specialises in history of medicine and of colonialism. She is the Director of Scottish Centre for Global History at the School of Humanities, University of Dundee. She is the author of Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India (2012) and Disparate Remedies: Making Medicines in Modern India (forthcoming). Her present researches is on modern alcohol and its many lives in colonial South Asia.
Landscapes of Zika: ‘Big Data’ and Imagined Epidemic Space in Urban Cape Verde Laurie Denyer Willis (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) Following the revelation that the Zika virus (ZIKV) had emerged on the islands of Cape Verde, West Africa, rumours of different etiological pathways circled. From larvicide in drinking water, genetically modified mosquitos, bad batches of rubella vaccine to historic undercounting of microcephaly cases, each rumour was underpinned by a belief that certain kinds of mothers and children did not count on the global stage. Zika and Microcephaly were understood by Cape Verdeans as yet another instance of the violence of absence and omission, negotiated through the lens of a complicated relationship to African nationalist projects. Based on ethnographic research working with a ‘Big Data’ driven project that used two-way interactive radio to understand the ‘behaviour’ of individuals and communities during and within epidemic ’space’, this paper argues that in order to understand Zika we must consider the political ecology of Zika, specifically the ways that absent and decaying water, rubbish and sewage infrastructures enabled a Zika crisis, vividly depicting the way that epidemics trace the pathways of state abandonment and violence in the post-colonial city. Here, I critique the linear chain that links knowledge to behaviour change, and insist upon paying attention to how Zika in urban Cape Verde reveals how disease pathways are revelatory of power relations, urban toxicity and landscapes. Laurie Denyer Willis is a Research Fellow in Medical Anthropology in the Department of Global Health and Development at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her research concerns the urban and political ecologies of health and disease in postcolonial landscapes, exploring animal-human relations (mostly mosquitos and pigs), sensory forms of knowledge (mostly smell and touch), and religious forms of care and hope (mostly Pentecostal). Laurie completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology at McGill University in 2018. Her dissertation, The Salvific Sensorium: Pentecostal Life in Rio de Janeiro’s Subúrbios, was awarded both the Margaret Lock Prize in Social Studies of Medicine and ‘Best Dissertation’ from the Latin American Studies Association, Brazil Section. Laurie’s research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), The Wellcome Trust, the Department for International Development (DFID), the International Development Research Council (IDRC), and the Paul and Priscilla Gray Foundation at MIT.
From Fractured Publics to Shared Responses: Rethinking Environmental Responsibility through Mosquito Control in Lahore Nida Rehman (University of Cambridge) Ongoing and normalized infrastructural shortfall in the postcolonial city places a constant compensatory burden on citizens. They purchase and install generators, solar panels, water tanks, filters, or simply fill buckets to fill the gaps of infrastructural failure — maintaining abundance or staving scarcity. Re-cast as private caretakers, rather than citizens or public subjects, city inhabitants confront these infrastructural fractures along with other existing and renewed forms of spatial violence. In Lahore, the Aedes aegypti mosquito takes advantage of these fractures, while the public health state conceptualizes them as breeding grounds, uses them to redraw the city into atomized categories of surveillance, and to further relocate responsibility for urban care and maintenance to citizens through the biopolitcs of vector control. In this paper, I draw from fieldwork experiences with dengue control workers in Lahore, particularly women, to consider how their embodied practices, movements, and labors may help us confront the city’s splintered geographies of abundance and scarcity, and allocations of environmental responsibility. Their work entails careful responsiveness, not only to the habits and habitats of mosquitoes, but also, more broadly, to the city’s human and more-than-human ecologies. How might these contingent and assembled practices inform alternate paths to imagining and inhabiting the city, and to moving beyond sites of individual responsibility towards a more shared praxis of urban “response-ability”? Nida Rehman is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge interested in the ecological, political, and historical dimensions of urban environmental change, particularly in South Asia. Her doctoral research examines the historical geographies and political ecologies of vector-borne diseases and vector control practices in Lahore, Pakistan. She is a member of the ERC funded Rethinking Urban Nature research group at Cambridge, and has received additional funding from the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies, and the Royal Geographical Society.
Imperial Visions of Chineseness and Post-colonial Disease Vulnerability Freddie Stephenson (University of Nottingham) This paper examines pedigrees of disease and public health in two cities once under British imperialism - colonial Hong Kong and Shanghai’s International Settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The treatment of Chinese populations as a recipient of public health administration and their position in popular Western conceptions of salubrity indicate the way colonial subjects were imbued with a false sense of simplicity, creating a sense of myopia and risk toward infectious disease. It will be argued that the more explicitly “post-colonial” context of Hong Kong, and its long lineage of a shifting amorphous population, are partly responsible for the city’s repeated status as an envisaged location for some unspecified, but all-consuming, future epidemic. Taking the long durée post-colonial perspective indicates not only the manner in which the city has served as a vector point for the spread of contagion, but equally the socio-cultural continuities between new and old regimes of governance from the perspective of disease vulnerabilities. Shanghai - a city that fell under the ambiguous system of informal empire or “semi-colonialism” and was fundamentally recapitulated under the Chinese Communist Party – had a less overtly colonial past. As a result, despite sharing a number of characteristics with Hong Kong, the city lacks the cultural obsession with infectivity and is rarely the subject for the exploration of contagion in popular culture. The paper, then, engages with the ongoing ramifications of differing forms of imperial power and politics, probing how these relate to epidemiological discourses and landscapes of disease. Freddie Stephenson studied Politics and Modern History at the University of Manchester, before moving to the University of Nottingham to complete his Masters degree with the Department of History. He received funding from the Institute of Asia Pacific Studies to commence a doctoral examining notions of health in Hong Kong and Shanghai, circa. 1843-1925.
Infectious entanglements: managing potential pandemic futures in Frankfurt Meike Wolf (Goethe-Universität) Microbes and cities are often portrayed as sharing a common and entangled history. Cities, with their high population density, complex human-animal interfaces and global connectivity, seem to play a vital role in the emergence, spread, and management of pathogens as the empirical examples of SARS or tuberculosis have shown. Against this backdrop, the mutagenic potentials, unpredictability and mobility of viruses and bacteria have attracted scholarly and medical attention: microbes are unruly agents. They enable, transgress and substantiate relations between human and animal bodies, environments, commodities and standards. Consequently, no conclusion can yet be drawn as to which type of city will be affected most by emerging infectious agents and their associated disease burden. Current practices of biopreparedness in European mobility hubs (and elsewhere) can be understood as a strategic reaction against this entangled relationship, as attempts to govern in the face of microbial uncertainty. In this paper, the example of a biopreparedness exercise will be used to discuss how the emergence of highly contagious viruses – such as H1N1 – is closely linked to the emergence of emergency planning. By drawing on the example of a nurse training in Frankfurt an ethnographic approach is employed to investigate first how spatio-temporal strategies are made productive to intervene in unwanted microbial circulation processes. In a second step the underlying assumptions about microbial unruliness and its impact on emergency planning will be discussed. The ethnographic example is derived from an anthropological research project on the globalization of influenza and emerging practices and technologies of biopreparedness in London and Frankfurt. Meike Wolf is a medical anthropologist and assistant professor at the University of Frankfurt who explores how biomedical knowledge, technologies, and practices are employed to shape and modify bodies and environments, and to intervene in future scenarios. Specifically, she is interested in the mutual entrapments of human and microbial life (condensing in the concept of infection). Her current areas of research include urban preparedness and invasive “tropical“ mosquitoes in Europe.
Participants Andrea Bagnato Piet Zwart Institute) andrea.bagnato@me.com Uli Beisel (Universität Bayreuth Startseite) uli.beisel@uni-bayreuth.de Nandini Bhattacharya (University of Dundee) n.s.bhattacharya@dundee.ac.uk Laurie Denyer Willis (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) Laurie.denyerwillis@lshtm.ac.uk Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge) mg107@cam.ac.uk Steve Hinchliffe (University of Exeter) Stephen.Hinchliffe@exeter.ac.uk Michelle Pentecost (King’s College London) michelle.pentecost@kcl.ac.uk Nida Rehman (University of Cambridge) nr419@cam.ac.uk Freddie Stephenson (University of Nottingham) Freddie.Stephenson@nottingham.ac.uk Meike Wolf (Goethe-Universität) Meike.Wolf@em.uni-frankfurt.de